As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
The importance of information technology (IT), which refers to the use of information handling systems to acquire, access, analyze, generate, and transmit data, especially in the context of a business or other enterprise, has increased dramatically with the proliferation of broadband communication infrastructure, affordable and sophisticated network-aware mobile devices, computerized applications for business and consumers, and oceans of data generated by such applications. Data centers came into existence as enterprises heavily invested in IT quickly recognized the need to create specialized facilities and resources to house and manage information handling systems and related infrastructure and components.
The architecture of early data centers was generally silo-like or vertical, with IT resources implemented in a non-shared landscape for a specific and limited application or objective. Vertically oriented data centers typically resulted in high capital costs, high operating costs, low utilization, poor interoperability, ad hoc management, and one-dimensional security. Horizontal data centers, characterized by the use of at least some degree of virtualization and/or co-located data center facilities, evolved in response to scaling and cost issues inherent in the vertical data center model. While reducing costs and improving utilization, horizontal data centers inherited the fragmented nature of the original data centers, wherein processing resources are acquired separately from storage resources which are acquired separately from networking resources and so forth.